


Redemption

by feralgayanddumbassaoyama



Series: Homemaker [3]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, PoV 3rd Person, Star Wars: Rebels References, barriss POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28681857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralgayanddumbassaoyama/pseuds/feralgayanddumbassaoyama
Summary: two conversations about ahsoka's lightsabers, ten years apart
Relationships: Barriss Offee/Ahsoka Tano
Series: Homemaker [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2090586
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	1. Chapter 1

From their side of the planet, just on the edge of Wild Space and the Unknown Regions, you could see practically the whole galaxy on a clear night.

There’s an outcropping of rock not far from the house, close enough to walk to without much trouble, but not so close as to warrant concern over a wayward child tripping over it.

Before Ahsoka came, and with her Hedala and Chenna, Barriss would come there regularly after the children were asleep, sometimes to meditate, sometimes to stargaze, sometimes to do not much of anything at all.

She’s not sure which she’s doing tonight, but with the recent addition of the Fardi sisters, space was tight, and sometimes she could hardly hear herself  _ think _ , so maybe she just wanted some peace and quiet. Or maybe she was beginning to turn over plans for another building to add to their home, to give the children more space. Spirits know they can use it, with five children and two adults.

Hearing a pair of footsteps crunching up the path to the outcrop, she realizes it might not be so easy to come across  _ quiet _ , until Ahsoka sits down next to her and doesn’t say a word.

“It’s beautiful,” she says, eventually. Barriss hums agreement.

“Why are you here?” she asks. “And who’s watching the kids?”

Ahsoka barks out a laugh. “Chenna is.”

Barriss raises an eyebrow, knowing Ahsoka probably can’t see it, utterly unimpressed.

“Relax,” she assures her, “All the others are asleep, and she’s at that age where she’s seeing how little sleep she can get before she crashes, you know?”

Barriss does not know, and, privately, assumes that Chenna is just taking advantage of Ahsoka’s fairly limited understanding of how much sleep humans (especially Force-Null humans) actually need. Togrutas need less than humans, and generally obtain it in short naps throughout the day, and Force-Sensitives could go for longer on less still.

She makes a note to talk to Chenna about it in the morning.

“You didn’t answer my first question,” she says.

Ahsoka shifts a little bit, and Barriss risks a glance over, and watches her cross her legs in the manner of crechelings, or like she was about to meditate. “I wanted to show you something,” she says.

She doesn’t say or do anything after that, and Barriss realizes that she’s waiting for a response.

“What?” she asks.

“It’s, um,” Ahsoka fidgets a little, and then reaches for her belt, and removes a lightsaber. Barriss stiffens. She knew Ahsoka  _ had _ lightsabers, but she didn’t use them — not here, at least. “Here,” she says.   
  


Barriss turns her entire body to face Ahsoka, mirroring her position, and exhales shakily. “Ahsoka,” she says shakily. “I can’t.”

She hasn’t held a lightsaber in  _ years _ , not since — not since the one she had been provided with, with the spinning red blades and the  _ pain _ … 

_ This weapon is your life _ , their teachers had said.

Ahsoka makes a cut off, frustrated noise. “I’m not  _ giving _ it to you,” she says, “I just want you to  _ hold _ it, okay?”

She doesn’t wait for Barriss this time, instead reaching forward and taking her hand, wrapping it around her own on the hilt of the saber, and then turns it on.

Barriss can’t help it — she gasps.

The blade of the lightsaber was pure, and white, and she’d never seen one like it before. The blade of a lightsaber matched the color of it’s crystal, and white kyber crystals were… well, it would be untrue to say they didn’t occur naturally, but they only formed after channeling so much energy that all else that came before was purged, and that was extremely hard to do..

“These crystals came from the saber of an Inquisitor,” Ahsoka says quietly. “When we fought, they were  _ screaming _ , full of so much anger and… and  _ pain _ . I overloaded them with the Force, and when I picked them up… they were purified.”

Barriss feels a flash of anger surge through her, hot and volatile before cooling and hardening.

“I see,” she says, taking her hand back. Ahsoka shuts off the lightsaber, and clips it onto her belt. “And in this analogy, am I the crystals before, or after you purified them?”  _ Or are you just rubbing in my face that you’re better than me _ , she doesn’t ask.

She still has her Inquisitor’s saber, wrapped in many layers of cloth and on a high shelf in the back of her closet. 

The blades are still red.

“I don’t know,” Ahsoka tells her. “You might not be in it at all. It’s just something that happened. If you see yourself in it… you would know better than me, wouldn’t you?”

Her anger subsides, not the release of emotion into the Force that her master taught her, but the simple passing of emotions from one thing to another. Not released, not let go, just a metamorphosis. “Oh.”

Ahsoka shrugs. “I just thought… I don’t know, I just thought I could tell you. It doesn’t have to make you feel a certain way, or, or any way at all. Like I said, it’s just a thing that happened. What you do with it is up to you.”

“Well,” Barriss says, “thank you for telling me.” She’s being honest.

Ahsoka flashes her a smile, one of the open-mouth ones that showed just a hint of teeth. “Of course,” she says, “what are friends for?”


	2. Chapter 2

Years later, Ahsoka will come back, as she does often, because this is her home, now, but she will not leave her ship. 

She had been there for hours by the time Roo-Roo fetched her, saying that Ma ‘Soka’s ship had landed but she wouldn’t come out for her or Wee or Zinn or  _ anyone _ and they were  _ worried _ , now, could she please come get her?   
  
Barriss, who had been minding Alora and Pypey to give Oora a much-needed rest, hadn’t registered the ship landing at all, so she tells Roo-Roo to watch her new cousins and remember that they were more fragile than most of her siblings had been, at that age, so be careful, and then hurries out to greet her wayward wife.

She knocks on the door to the ship, one of the small ones that wasn’t meant to hold anything bigger than a single human (or human-sized person, but it was Imperial originally, so Barriss doesn’t give them that credit), and to her surprise she’s let in almost immediately.

She steps in, and the door closes behind her.

“I’m staying,” Ahsoka tells her, and — Barriss was expecting a lot of things. That wasn’t one of them.

“In the ship?” She asks, aiming for lighthearted and missing. “That might make family dinners a bit complicated…”

Ahsoka lets out a laugh, more a gust of air and a trilling in her montrals that Barriss can’t  _ quite _ hear but can feel in her eyes.

“No,” she says, “Here. With you.”

Barriss shifts around a little, practically crawling on top of Ahsoka to reach the slightly more comfortable position of sitting on the powered-down consol, feet braced on the arm-rests of the only chair in the little pod. Once, she might have felt something besides concern, perhaps embarrassment at the intimacy of the situation, but the two of them were beyond such things.

“What about the Rebellion?” she asks

Once upon a time, she would be furious at Ahsoka for even considering leaving it. Once upon a time, she would have been out in the galaxy, by her side in action, if not in presence, even as it killed her to be away from their family. Such was the Jedi way — compassion for all, love for all, and none left over for themselves. Maybe not originally, but it was how they had been raised.

Now, she asks not out of a sense of loyalty to the ways of a long-dead and longer-scorned Order, but because she knew, she  _ knew _ what the Rebellion meant to Ahsoka, that it killed her to be away from her family to help them, but it killed her to be here, away from the action, had seen how the life left her day by day.

Damned if she went, damned if she stayed, dying either way.

Barriss couldn’t understand, _would_ _never_ understand, wanted Ahsoka to be _here,_ with her, with their _children_ , but she couldn’t stay angry over it. Oh, she hated her sometimes, with a ferocity that astounded her, like when one of Zinn’s lekku had gotten an infected cut and he’d been feverish and sobbing for _days_ , and Ahsoka _wasn’t there_ , but the horrified look on her face when she returned had cooled that flame fast enough.

“They think I’m dead,” Ahsoka says, and Barriss… Barriss knows many things, but she doesn’t know how to fix something when she doesn’t know the problem, so she reaches forward and takes Ahsoka’s hands, one in each of her own. 

Their wedding bands clack together on her wrists, and the ghost of a smile crosses Ahsoka’s face to see it. The bands are a promise:  _ two, as one _ . The touch is another:  _ I am here, I am here, I am here _ .

“Please talk to me,” Barriss pleads. “I want to help you, but I don’t know what’s wrong.”

“It’s Vader,” Ahsoka says, and a sneer crosses Barriss’s face. “Barriss, it’s  _ him _ .”

The sneer is replaced by a confused wrinkling of the brow, a pursing of the lips. “I don’t understand,” she says. “You’ve faced Vader before, haven’t you?” She’d always come back rattled, but never like  _ this _ .

“Barriss…” Ahsoka says again, “It’s Anakin. He  _ Fell _ .”

She feels helpless in the face of the utter despair in her voice. The name  _ Anakin _ is said with old hurt and grief, but there is anger there too, anger at the Empire, at the death of the Jedi, at the murder of younglings, at the  _ death of Anakin Skywalker _ , just as old and just as strong.

She says nothing, and waits.

“He says he Fell because of me,” Ahsoka says, at last. “Because I left. Barriss, he was so  _ angry _ …”

“Then he is angry at you for surviving,” Barriss says, words sharp on her tongue. “Have you ever known Anakin Skywalker to have  _ been forced _ to do anything?” The words are softer, this time, molded into anger that Barriss  _ will not _ let herself direct to Ahsoka. She is not the true target of her fury.

Gentler still, she says: “Falling is a choice, Ahsoka, and you and I both know that there is nothing in the galaxy that could have ever truly forced his hand. If… if what you say is true,” and she would think on that, later, let it sink in, because a part of her still thought  _ Anakin Skywalker _ and thought  _ that is infallible, that is strength, that is the Perfect Jedi, that is a Hero _ , and Vader was the reason their children woke up screaming in the night, “then Anakin  _ made a choice _ , and you know that Anakin never let anyone make choices for him.”

“I want to believe you,” Ahsoka says, “and I know that you’re right, but I don’t know if I can let myself.”

“Remember the story you told me, about your lightsabers?” Barriss asks. Ahsoka closes her eyes and leans forward, hands slipping to her wrists, face cradled between the palms of two green hands.

“I remember,” she says, “I was sort of  _ there, _ you know, when it happened.” They both laugh, even if the joke isn’t very funny.

“Maybe one day, Anakin will find something that makes him remember what it was like not to hurt,” Barriss says. She doesn’t think he deserves it, but this is not about Anakin.

“Maybe,” Ahsoka says, “But I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> find me on tumblr as dykepixie!


End file.
